Do I look Yemenite in this?

This evening I had one of those encounters;

We were out for a meal at the local Indian restaurant.

Head Waiter: You from Yemen?

RK: Glasgow.

HW: Glasgow?

RK: Glasgow.

WH: Oh.

I get this in various iterations, usually when I meet someone from a different culture, often an immigrant to the UK – folk from Greece, Turkey, Egypt – countries where more of the people have dark eyes and dark hair than the UK; I guess my complexion is a little dark, although this depends on the season.

When I was a teenager, before my hair fell-out and I went about with not quite frizzy, but certainly curly hair, I was often asked about my Yemenite origins, or, perhaps somewhere in North Africa; Algeria, Morocco?

I have sometimes pondered my ancestry.

I haven’t done one of those genetic buccal smear tests yet, although, perhaps one day.

I am fairly clear about my recent family-tree; Glasgow(Gorbals)/Newcastle(Byker), with origins in Russia (?Latvia) and Poland, although, this with all the genealogy and historical wanderings of 18^th Century Jews, is likely open to conjecture.

If you take the biblical interpretation – the one on which the State of Israel is predicated, my long-long-ago relatives were either exiled from the Land of Israel in 580 BC, with a transport up the Mediterranean to Babylon – Iraq, or following the subsequent return to The Land, in 70AD when the Romans kicked us out.

Who knows.

Everyone’s genes are a little murky. And, I know it confuses folk when they ask the, ‘Where are you from question,’ when, my answer is really the content of this blog, but I can’t often be bothered to go into such details with passing strangers or, head waiters.

All of this seems to come close to racial stereotypes of the Near and Middle-East; I am the way I am because of evolution and inter-breeding; my kids are half Jewish – possibly the first organised break-away from the mainstream in my family’s history barring the odd Cossack mishap/Persian romp.

It is interesting, when I am in Israel, particularly when it is summer-time and I am tanned, I usually fit-in; only this December when waiting for my sister-in-law to determine the cost of a watermelon did someone mistake me for a market trader – this in the Carmel Market in Tel Aviv; a place of insane trading and Eastern charm.

Fitting-in with the crowd; how intriguing.

A few blogs ago I wrote about my chocolate-boy experiences as a youngster at school in Glasgow; most of the other kids in my class were fair, some blue eyed, others with ginger hair and freckles, that is the Scottish archetype. I wasn’t one of those.

I think of Colin Wilson in the 50’s writing about his situation as an outsider, reflecting Sartre, Camus and Dostoevsky; each of us inside the society but somehow also locked-out, staring-in, uninvited guests at the party; gate-crashers. How nice to fit-in, to belong.

This was more than I had bargained-for in requesting Aloo gosht;